The major research objectives of the proposed project center around the analysis of 30 hours of videotaped data collected in a one year naturalistic study of peer interaction among three and four year olds in a nursery school setting and the collection of six hours of longitudinal data on the three year old group a year later in the same setting. The data will be transcribed and analyzed in regard to several theoretical issues in the area of childhood socialization. These are: (1) the isolation and identification of communicative strategies employed by the children to initiate, construct, maintain, and terminate social interactive events; (2) the estimation of social contextual effects (in this case the various ecological areas and activities making up the nursery school environment) on the language styles of the children; (3) the identification of features of the children's social perspectives in the peer environment as reflected in role and fantasy play and the establishment of friendship groups; and (4) the identification of sex role and status awareness by the children and its manifestation in peer interaction. The proposed project involves a request for funds for video tape equipment to undertake the data analysis and for a part time research assistant. Analysis techniques involve: (1) the transcription of the interactive data; (2) the conversational (sociolinguistic) analysis of interactive episodes with a focus on topic initiation and maintenance, sequencing and turn-taking, and termination procedures; and (3) the isolation of interactive patterns in the data regarding the theoretical issues cited above.